Tirupati is one of the most revered
places of worship for Hindus, especially South Indians. It is located
in Chittoor district of Andra Pradesh. It's is well known for its
famous Venkateshwara Temple, which is surrounded by seven hills
namely Seshadri, Venkatadri, Garudadri, Narayandri, Vrishabadri,
Anjanadri, Neeladri. Because of the presence of hills, the deity is
known as ' Yedu kondala wada ' in Telegu, which means resident of
seven hills. Apart from the Venkateshwara Temple, Tirupati is also
known for its wooden toys and copper articles.
Leaving the tourist attractions aside,
Tirupati is home to more than 50 computer dealers. The city is a
growing hub for the education segment and SMBs. It has well-known
engineering and medical colleges. Due to its close proximity to
Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad, Tirupati is a fast growing tier-2
city. Tirupati has an active association called TCDA ( Tirupati
Computer Dealer Association ). Like all upcountry cities, this city
is also not free of problems. Warranty poses a huge problem for
dealers and service is always in demand. P Ravi Babu of IC Tech and
Secretary of TCDA said, “There are few service centers and when
ever we face issues, we either take it to Bengaluru or Chennai. It
will be nice if we can have service centers in Tirupati. The customer
also feel assured and we will have few logistical problems.”
Almost all the leading brands like
Dell, Compaq, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Samsung etc are present here in the
market. Home and SMB segments form the major revenue vertical. B
Prashanth Srinivas Murthy, Proprietor, Micro Computers said, “I
deal in networking products from Microsoft. The main problem which
dealers like me face, is service issue. We get maximum DoA cases and
each case takes more than a month to solve. I have to face the brunt
of the customer. When the margins are so less and so much of
competition, it will be nice if the vendors can have a simplified
process for after-sales service. Tirupati is a growing market and the
overall turnover is also close to 80—1.5 crore. Atleast the
distributors can take notice of this problem and do something in this
regard.”
The city also has presence of telecom
partners who time and again try to get into IT selling. Srinivasulu
Reddy of Hitech Computers and President of TCDA concluded, “Since,
it is a growing market, issues are bound to arise. Price variation
poses a problem .The agenda of our next meeting is to discuss
possible solutions to all the existing problems like warranty,
service, price and stock.”